A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

I. It pleased God now to separate that person of whom Christ was to come▪ from the rest of the world, that his church might be upheld in his family and posterity till Christ should come; as he did in calling Abraham out of his own country, and from his kindred, to go into a distant country, that God should show him, and bringing him first out of Ur of the Chaldees to Charran, and then […] the land of Canaan.

I. It pleased God now to separate that person of whom Christ was to come▪ from the rest of the world, that his church might be upheld in his family and posterity till Christ should come; as he did in calling Abraham out of his own country, and from his kindred, to go into a distant country, that God should show him, and bringing him first out of Ur of the Chaldees to Charran, and then 〈…〉 the land of Canaan.

It was before observed, that the corruption of the world with idolatry was now become general; mankind were almost wholly overrun with idolatry: God therefore saw it necessary, in order to uphold true religion in the world, that the•• should be a family separated from the rest of the wo•ld. It proved to be high time to take this course, lest the church of Christ should wholly be carried away with the apostasy. For the church of God itself, that had been upheld in the line of Abraham's ancestors, was already considerably corrupted. Abraham's own country and kindred had most of them fallen off; and without some extraordinary interposition of Providence, in all likelihood, in a generation or two more, the true religion in this line would have been extinct. Therefore God saw it to be time to call Abraham, the person in whose family he intended to uphold the true religion, out of his own country, and from his kindred, to a far distant country, that his posterity might there remain a people separate from all the rest of the world; that so the true religion might be upheld there, while mankind besides were swallowed up in Heathenism.